Like James Agee and Walker Evans's seminal publication, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that introduces the viewer to the landscape of southern poverty during the first great American depression, Down Country begins with the images. And so it should -- to begin to know the landscape of the Galisteo Basin in north central New Mexico, one must walk it as intimately as Lucy Lippard and Edward Ranney have for the past 35+ years. To walk, to explore the land, is to begin to see, and so the reader is presented with four of Ed Ranney's very quiet but utterly compelling landscapes of the Basin. Each of these black and white images takes the long view; Ranney's view camera captures the great expanses of the terrain from a distance and one is invited to enter with reverence and perhaps a hint of trepidation. It is a landscape that will never reveal all the secrets of the past that lie sleeping, cradled, unexcavated although not undisturbed, within the Basin.



Agricultural rhythms have always been important to the people who live in the Galisteo Basin. Enter the Basin, even as a visitor, and the traditional Western concept of linear time slowly fades - replaced, gradually, with the sense of cyclical time where life, growth, death and decay are understood as ever renewing processes. It is impossible to walk in the land without sensing its rhythms. As Lippard says: "Landscape values memory." To document the long memory of this place she pieces together fragments of information from the known historical record, from potsherds and oral histories, from her own careful research and that of archaeologists, anthropologist, ethnographers, and historians, as well as her long conversations with some of the people whose ancestors lived in the pueblos, now ruins, that dot the Basin. Much like reconstructing a shattered ceramic vessel, Lippard, carefully rebuilds as much as she can from the fragments that create memory. "History is silent on the details;" she calls what she describes "imagined landscapes" of the Tano people in the Galisteo Basin.



Lippard states unequivocally: "New Mexico is not a comfortable landscape; its very lack of comfort is compatible with its harsh history." It is this harsh landscape that Ranney photographs. He turns his lens not toward the little town of 265 people that make up contemporary Galisteo; rather he carefully slings his view camera over his shoulder and hikes out into the Basin with his film holders and other heavy equipment, sometimes on public land, more often on private. He photographs what he finds or what others show him, making visible the invisible. His images are evocative without being romantic; there isn't a trace of sentimentality for what was "lost" in any of the photographs. They demand more than a casual glance; like the landscape in which they were made, the images refuse to give up their secrets easily. One must return many times to these images before it is possible to begin to see what one is looking at. Reading the text helps; references are made throughout to plate numbers. The photographs, however, can stand on their own, and they do; portfolios of images printed on glossier paper that has the same weight as the paper used for the text are carefully seeded throughout the chapters, sequenced not chronologically but as if one were circumnavigating the major archaeological sites in the Basin. Ranney's images provide a visual revere not possible for most visitors to the Basin. Gates are locked, no trespassing signs, although fairly discreet, abound, and ranchers carry guns. Even if one were to gain unfettered access, it wouldn't be possible to see these landscapes in the same way Ranney shows them to us. He possesses the knowledge to reveal, if one looks attentively, what is hidden in plain sight. Ranney shows us the faraway nearby in his images, they play with scale moving subtly between the sweeping landscape to the fine detail of rock art; the shallow waters of the Galisteo River to the crumbling stones and adobes of ancient pueblo walls. MNM Press designer David Skolkin carefully considered the placement of each image (one to a page); many images form panoramas that span a two-page spread or formally relate to each other in beautiful symmetry. One of my favorite images is plate 72, Petroglyph panel, San Cristóbal Pueblo in which a stick figure rushes toward a stream descending from a mountain. Even hundreds of years ago the importance of water as a life source was understood. Have we learned anything since this petroglyph was carved into sacred rock?



In historical time, ten years is a blip, but to write a book, ten years is a long time. The reader must make a similar time commitment, not ten years certainly, but this book requires a clean well-lighted place and undisturbed time to read. This isn't a coffee table book where one can peruse the images, scan the captions, and come away with any sense of understanding. With 28 chapters to tell the story of over 500 years in one place, this is a weighty tome; there are 316 pages of text, maps, drawings and illustrations, notes (the notes are almost as interesting to read as the text and provide wonderfully detailed asides, both personal and professional), an exhaustive bibliography, and, of course, the photographs. Ranney's landscape photographs are reproduced and spot varnished so they shimmer. Imbedded in the text are other photographs by, among others, Lippard and Nels Nelson who took many images during the years he worked as an archaeologist in the Basin between 1912 and 1915, as well as several historic images. These images do not resonate as Ranney's do. They are small, and, unfortunately, not well reproduced. If pressed this would be my one complaint about the book because these images are formally and aesthetically strong and provide illustrative information, they should not have been regulated to a second-class position.

Lippard plans a second book on the last two hundred years of the Galisteo Basin's history bringing us up to the present. Let's hope she asks Ranney to make the images for her next volume and that it doesn't take her another ten years to finish. No matter how long it takes, the book will be well worth waiting for. —Mary Anne Redding